These are just a few examples of the strange behaviour of
Mathematica's so called "significance arithmetic" at very low
precision. These are not bugs but consequences of the way significance
arithmetic works. It is not suitable for very low precision
computations.
This issue has already caused many heated debates on this list in the
past and I do not wish to enter another. The best way to deal with this
is not to use low precision arithmetic for such purposes. It is never
needed.
Andrzej Kozlowski
On 19 Feb 2005, at 08:31, Gehrmann, James E wrote:
> I'm running Mathematica v. 5.1 under WinXP and had the following
> interaction with Mathematica:
>
> 5>0
>
> True
>
> 5.>0
>
> True
>
> N[5]>0
>
> True
>
> N[5,3]>0
>
> True
>
> N[5,2]>0
>
> False
>
> N[50000,2]>0
>
> False
>
> Are the last two results a bug or am I not understanding the N
> function?
>
> Thanks for you help.
>
>